70 himself wholly Brazilian. He and his wife have five children and five grand- children, and all of them are Brazil- ian. His English is fluently American but is laced with some exotic inflec- tions, no doubt as a result of his up- bringing. He was raised in Brazil by American missionary parents from Arkansas, who would take him back home on their furloughs. He attended college in Arkansas and went on to the Princeton Theological Seminary be- fore returning to Brazil, where he has served three separate stints as executive for the mission there of the Pres- byterian Church/U.S.A. The book he'd come to New York to help launch, "Torture in Brazil" (Vintage/Random House), was an English translation of "Brasil: N unca Mais" ("Brazil: Never Again"), orig- inally published in Petrópolis in the summer of 1985. The jacket copy of the American edition describes the book as "a shocking report on the pervasive use of torture by Brazilian military governments, 1964-1979, secretly prepared by the Archdiocese of São Paulo." I hadn't had much time to look through it before the luncheon, but what I'd found was indeed shock- ing, not only because of its content- detailed accounts of torture used sys- tematically by the Brazilian military against political opponents-but, even more, because of the sources of that content. I'd read other accounts of torture, in reports by Amnesty Inter- national and Helsinki Watch and Americas Watch, for example, and, more recently, in the remarkable Ar- gentine volume "Nunca Más." But these reports almost always consisted of testimony by victims or witnesses which had been collected, as it were, after the fact-after the victims or witnesses had escaped or been released and were hiding or living in exile, or else after the regime concerned had fallen. In this regard, the Argentine volume, recently published in an American edition by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is an exemplary model, largely consisting of the scrupulously ordered and painstakingly corrobo- rated testimony of hundreds of victims and witnesses-testimony that began to be compiled within days after the fall of the Argentine junta by an offi- cial National Commission on the Dis- appeared. In fact, the establishment of the commission was one of the new civilian President Raúl AlfonsÍn's first acts upon taking office, on De- cember 10, 1983. But "Brasil: Nunca Mais" was dif- ferent, for it was based on the official records of the regime itself-verbatim transcripts of military trials which were no doubt never intended to be read by the public at large. Documents of this sort are never supposed even to survive the fall of a totalitarian re- gime: in the rare cases where they exist at all, they're destroyed when the regime collapses. Marshall Meyer, who served as a rabbi in Buenos Aires for twenty-five year and was one of the members of AlfonsÍn's National Commission (though he's now moved back to New York City, where he heads the B'nai Jeshurun congrega- tion, on the upper West Side), once told me how he and his colleagues rushed over to the headquarters of the SIDE, the Argentine military's secret security police, within days of the country's changeover to civilian rule, only to find the place gutted: they could still smell the ashes of the archives. The Argentine regime had had to abandon power in haste, in utter humiliation, following its igno- minious defeat in the Falkland Islands war. The Brazilian military, on the other hand, had taken its time in leav- ing. The inauguration of the new ci- vilian President, J osé Sarney, in the spring of 1985, had been preceded by a carefully calibrated, delicately ca- denced transition-the so-called dis- tensâo, or relaxation, and then aber- tura, or opening-which had been over a decade in the making. The Brazilian military authorities had certainly had time to clean up loose ends, to efface any embarrassing or incriminating pieces of evidence. And yet here that evidence was-in their own words, wrenched from their own files. Jaime Wright was listed as the translator of the American edition of "Brasil: Nunca Mais," but it was clear from the introduction, by the Brazilianist Joan Dassin, that Wright had been heavily involved in the proj- ect from its inception. Indeed, al- though more than thirty people were involved at one stage or another in putting the book together, only two of them had allowed themselves to be r MAY 25, 1987 identified at the time of its publication -Paulo Evaristo Cardinal Arns, who is the Archbishop of São Paulo, and the Presbyterian minister Jaime Wright. At the press luncheon, Wright eXplained that the other peo- ple who had participated in compiling the volume not only had managed to keep the existence of the project abso- lutely secret for more than five years- the time it took to complete the work -but also had succeeded In keeping their own identities absolutely secret over the year and a half since the book's publication. Such secrecy had, of course, been essential to the work on the project during the time when the military still held power in Brazil; however, it remained essential, they all agreed, because, though civilians were now nominally back in control of the Brazilian government for the first time since 1964, the military remained a powerful presence on the scene-only halfway out the door, as it were-and a continuous threat to come barging right back in. Indeed, Wright in- formed us, the publication of "Brasil: N unca Mais" had been followed a year later by that of a furious answer- ing polemic, the work of a decidedly unrepentant lieutenant in Brazilian military intelligence, which was enti- tled "Brasil Sempre" ("Brazil Al- ways"). In subsequent meetings with Wright, I learned how this Presbyte- rian minister had become so intimately involved in a top-secret project of São Paulo's Catholic archdiocese. That re- lationship had its origins several years earlier. Jaime Wright's younger brother, Paulo Stuart Wright, had been a Christian student activist and had then become an assemblyman in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina during the tumultuously re- formist early sixties; he was, in fact, the first child of American missionary parents ever to attain such high politi- cal office in Brazil. He must have been effective at his work, for he was one of the first legislators to be stripped of their mandates in the weeks following the April 1, 1964, coup that brought the military to power. Paulo Wright fled the country, but the following year he smuggled himself back in and began to work in the underground, organizing peasant coöperatives and rural networks in, among other areas, Maranhão, José Sarney's home state, in the north. (President Sarney, for his . part, was in those days a close civilian collaborator of the military overseers.) "Paulo was teaching people how to